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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27541102">A Russian soup kitchen</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hypatia_66/pseuds/Hypatia_66'>Hypatia_66</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>A wartime childhood [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Berlin (City), Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, Red Army, Sieges, World War II</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 16:54:01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,371</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27541102</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hypatia_66/pseuds/Hypatia_66</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>LJ Short Affair challenge. Prompts: wriggle, brown.</p><p>Illya and his adoptive parents are in besieged Berlin. Illya's will to survive is tested.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Illya Kuryakin/Original Character(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>A wartime childhood [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1702435</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>A Russian soup kitchen</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Berlin, April/May 1945</strong>
</p><p>Continuous bombing by American and British planes had rendered Berlin almost unrecognisable. The sound became unbearable – day and night, continuous, it never ceased. The whole of Berlin was in ruins. There were rumours of the Russian army’s approach. The stream of refugees was growing and transport was hard to come by.</p><p>The boy, hidden behind the banisters, was listening to his adoptive parents arguing. He heard his name – not his own name, Ilya, but the name they had given him when he utterly refused to respond to the name that Hilde had wanted to give him. The Führer’s name, Adolph, was anathema.</p><p>“My dear, you must go while you can – and take Jan with you.”</p><p>“I don’t want to leave you, Hans… we’ll never see each other again … we might both die. The boy can go. I don’t care about him – he hates me.”</p><p>“Hilde, he doesn’t hate you – he’s a child, not even twelve years old.”</p><p>“He has always hated me. He only likes you because you saved him from dying of cold. I don’t know why you bothered – he’s Russian. The Russians have always hated us.”</p><p>“If you stay, Hilde, you know what will happen to you. I couldn’t bear that.”</p><p>“Oh, <em>you</em> couldn’t!” she snorted, but was then silent and it seemed there was a possibility that she would now agree to go.</p><p>“I’ll help you to pack,” he said gently.</p><p>Ilya silently ran upstairs to his room.</p><p>&lt;&gt; </p><p>He refused to hold her hand when they finally left in the early dawn during a momentary lull in the bombing. Hans had slipped away from his unit to see them off – unmissed in the general mayhem. He waved as they quickly walked away. Hilde kept looking back, the boy not once. Hans sighed.</p><p>When he returned, he found all his remaining comrades lying dead in the street. Their group had taken a direct hit; there were bodies and worse everywhere. It was the end of everything. Hearing another squadron of bombers approaching, he looked around at the ruination and down at his friends before turning to run. He didn’t hear the bomb that killed him.</p><p>&lt;&gt;&lt;&gt; </p><p>Hilde and Ilya joined a column of refugees walking and running westwards away from the city. Wreckage lay across the streets and the smell of death accompanied every step they took as they picked their way among the dust and rubble of wood and bricks, glass and stone. Traumatised occupants of destroyed houses sat unseeing, uncaring of the carnage everywhere.</p><p>By late-morning, Hilde could go no further. She sat down on a flat block of stone in the shelter of a great wall – once part of an ornate eighteenth-century building – told Ilya to go on without her and gave him the bag of food. He looked down at her in surprise. “But what will you do for food?” he asked.</p><p>“I won’t need it,” she said. “You can have it, all of it. The world will be yours now. Just go.”</p><p>“Will you go back?” he said, a little concerned despite his dislike of her.</p><p>“No. Can’t you hear it? – the Russians, <em>your</em> people, are shelling the city now. There’s nothing left for me. He’ll be dead soon. I’ll be dead – <em>you’ll</em> be dead… We’ll all be dead.” </p><p>People were falling all around them as shells joined the rain of bombs. Ilya flinching from the carnage, frowned. The kindly Hans, a member of the Wehrmacht and no Nazi, had taken him in, raised and educated him like a son, despite his wife’s reluctance and dislike of the boy – but now Ilya felt his hatred of her melt a little. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Thank you for the food.” He touched her shoulder and said – not aufwiedersehen: he would never see her again – but, “Adieu.”</p><p>She didn’t reply and he left her to join the people fleeing west. There was little talk, no conversation, no farewells to those who fell by the wayside but among what speech there was, Ilya heard that the Russian army would come when the shelling stopped. He wondered if his now rusty Russian would be good enough to convince his countrymen that he wasn’t a German. Would he even get the chance to use it before they killed him?</p><p>A shell burst ahead of him, killing men, women and children. It flung stones and rubble over the remaining refugees. Ilya was hit by flying debris and knocked out. He lay under a dusty mass of crumbling masonry, invisible and ignored in the chaos of frightened people trying to escape.</p><p>&lt;&gt;&lt;&gt; </p><p>Army units and refugees alike fled west to the Elbe and a few – a very few – managed to break through the Soviet encirclement and survive to surrender to the Americans. The Americans pragmatically left it to the Red Army to take the city, thereby unwittingly giving the rear guard of that army carte blanche to set about mass rape and pillage.</p><p>The shelling and bombing had ceased. The silent darkness was disturbing. Ilya came to his senses not knowing where he was or what had happened. Unaware of it as yet, he was trapped in an air pocket under a partly fallen building. When he moved, rubble started to pour in on him, frightening him and making it hard to breathe. Almost whimpering, he felt around for the bag Hilde had given him. It wasn’t there. When he fell, it must have been a welcome find for someone. He just had to lie still and wait for morning.</p><p>It wasn’t long to wait. Dawn was already breaking, its faint light revealing gaps in the fallen masonry; gaps large enough to wriggle through if he was careful. Shifting his position, he began to drag himself over sharp obstacles towards the growing light.</p><p>As he pulled himself free of the grey-brown dust and heavy stone blocks, the whole broken edifice began to collapse in on itself and, rolling away, he was only just in time to avoid being crushed.</p><p>He got to his feet and looked around at the devastation. Dead bodies had become such a common sight, he barely noticed them, but the skyline was so completely changed, he no longer knew where he was or what direction to take. No-one paid any attention to a lost child; he was on his own. Survival was the main thing. He’d managed before; he could do it again.</p><p>In his present bruised state, and with hunger and thirst to contend with, it took him a long time to get anywhere recognisable. He needed to find not only some sort of sustenance, but also shelter or a hiding place before nightfall. The latter, accomplished more successfully than the former, he bedded down on the contents of a bombed-out house but with an empty stomach.</p><p>In the morning, he went on, with no plan but to find food and drink. His tongue was swollen with thirst and the effects of dust. As he came staggering with exhaustion into a partly-cleared square, a smell – not of death, this time, but of something savoury – tickled his nose. He stopped in amazement. Soldiers were doling out soup to a line of people as bedraggled and dusty as himself. He approached and heard the soldiers speaking in his own language.</p><p>“Tovarishchi,” he uttered, “tovarishchi, pozhalusta!”</p><p>One of the soldiers turned and pointed to the end of the line. Ilya protested faintly, “Ya russki, menya zovut Ilya Nikolaivitch …” and fainted. No-one in the line came to his aid – extreme hunger and thirst produce only the most basic of survival instincts – but one of the soldiers had caught his words and hearing his accent came and raised him. “Little comrade,” he said and when the blue eyes opened, he held a bowl of soup to the boy’s lips, “Here. Drink.” Ilya drank, choked, and drank again. “Slowly, slowly, malchik,” said the soldier.</p><p>The Red Army had installed itself in the city and among its first administrative measures was the establishment of soup kitchens for those starving citizens who had survived the bombing and shelling. It saved many lives, not least Ilya’s. The war was over – malnourished for too long, he would never grow tall – but he had survived.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>The Battle of Berlin left the city in ruins and many thousands of dead and wounded, even without the trauma of mass rape. The Russian army, however, also set about restoring clean water supplies and established soup kitchens for the starving people who had remained in the city.</p><p>Illya's name would have been spelled like this before he went to the US.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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